China is furious that environmental readings have exposed lies around COVID-19 deaths. The data collected shows a clear mismatch from the information released by the Chinese government about how many people died and at what time. This is a very sensitive subject with China engaging in a cold trade war with Australia over the origins of COVID-19 while providing support to affected smallers countries as calls are made for China to pay billions in penalties due to their coverup.
Before Beijing's crackdown, China's bureaucracy had been conducting business as usual – analysing, assessing and reporting on everything about its citizenry. The researchers from Washington University and Ohio State University say they have tracked down this early government data and combined it with reports in state-controlled and social media.
Among this data was the activities of eight crematories in Wuhan. By January 25 these were inexplicably operating around the clock.
Based on such sources, the researchers argue the total number of infections and fatalities before February was at least ten times that of the official figure announced by Beijing.
[...] The study tracked the sale [of] funeral urns to verify these estimates. In the January-March period during which the crematoriums were operating at peak levels, some 36,000 had been distributed.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @09:21PM (4 children)
Or this is just nature doing its thing, and if you've been following criticism of the numbers from Western democracies, we find that everybody has been lying about their numbers.
Now we have an indication that China too lies about their numbers. Everybody lies about their numbers until journalists catch them at it. Then Trump and China will still double down anyway. C'est la vie.
The only thing that is shocking to me is that the rulers can keep you distracted with so many levels of us vs. them. But that should not be shocking to me. Want to rule the planet of the apes? Convince these apes over here that those apes over there hate their freedumbs, and then do the same with those apes. Profit. You could strip-mine the entire planet (the apes will take care of the labor for you too!) and sell it all for gold-plated latinum and the apes would be too busy attacking each other over their missing resources to figure out where it went.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @02:35AM
Journalists lie about their numbers too. Everyone is biased with an agenda.
FFS, it's a virus with a 2 week incubation period. It's been running rampant on the world for over 6 months shutting down whole economies. That's more than 24 weeks. Can anyone seriously claim that we still don't know how the fuck covid works?
There may not have been time to create an vaccine or defense against covid. But by this time there should be absolutely NO EXCUSE for not having a complete FACTUAL breakdown on how it infects, who it infects and what steps need and should be taken to deal with it.
It's just one big media shit show of agenda pushing.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday June 16 2020, @01:51PM (2 children)
How much have they been lying about their numbers? Are they all secretly running their crematoriums full time?
Which happens a lot less often in China than it does in democracies around the world. When there is this breezy a disregard for the quality and quantity of the lies (and as in this case, the institutions that have some effect on reducing the degree and harm of those lies), that indicates to me that the lying doesn't really matter to you. There's a lot of these moral equivalences in the overall discussion. It's time we stopped that.
China lied in the crucial early phase of a disease that has killed over 400k people. But those lies blurred in all the other lies you don't really care about either. So you decided to blather about stripmining the Earth instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @09:10PM (1 child)
Which part? The lying or the being caught at lying?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 16 2020, @09:50PM